Sara Terry – The Aftermath Project

Sara Terry

Sara Terry is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker best known for her work covering post-conflict stories. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, for her long-term project, “Forgiveness and Conflict: Lessons from Africa.” Her first long-term post-conflict body of work, “Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace,” led her to found The Aftermath Project in 2003 on the premise that “War is Only Half the Story.” An accomplished speaker on aftermath and visual literacy issues, her many lectures include a 2013 TedX talk and appearances at The Annenberg Space for Photography.

An award-winning former staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and magazine freelance writer, Terry made a mid-career transition into documentary photography in the late 1990s. Her first film, “Fambul Tok,” an award-winning, feature-length documentary about an unprecedented grass-roots forgiveness program in Sierra Leone, grew out of her still photography project, “Forgiveness and Conflict,” which was also supported by Catalyst for Peace. Terry won a grant from the Sundance Documentary Institute for the film, which premiered at SXSW in March 2011. Her second documentary, FOLK, which follows three singer-songwriters through the sub-culture of American folk music, premiered at the Nashville Film Festival in April 2013.

“Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace” was published in September 2005 by Channel Photographics and was named as one of the best photo books of the year by Photo District News. Terry’s work has been published in newspapers and magazines in the United States, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Bosnia, and Japan. Her photographs have been exhibited at such venues as the United Nations, the Moving Walls exhibition at the Open Society Institute in New York, the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, and the Leica Gallery in Solms, Germany, and Fotofest, Houston. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Portland (OR) Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, and in many private collections.